I recently wrote an article on here where I looked at what Britain’s future might be and came to the terrible conclusion that Britain’s future might resemble that of Lebanon in the mid to late 1970’s. Excessive levels of inappropriate immigration coupled with a crumbling state apparatus, the rise of sectarianism, asymmetric policing, legal and resource allocation systems, the state’s doctrine of multiculturalism, the atomising of society and the transition of Britain from a high trust to a low trust society, doesn’t bode well for the future. I look to the future and I don’t see things getting better or even see relative peace.

A while back one of my commentators on here recommended me to read more deeply the work of Professor David Betz from King’s College London’s Department of War Studies and I said that I was aware of his work but had not read his recent essays on the potential for civil wars in the West. I’d like to thank that person who made this recommendation as I have read both parts one and two of Professor Betz’s essay entitled ‘Civil War comes to the West’. Professor Betz’s piece did not leave me with many feelings of optimism after I had finished reading it. I look around my own country and I see what he’s seeing; such as the horrendous levels of immigration, the growth of identity politics, the two tier legal and policing system, the cities that are going (or have gone) feral along with the growth of radical Islam and the growing negative response from others to that phenomenon.

All the elements for Britain to descend into the cess pit of severe social disturbance at best, or at worst civil war as Lebanon did, are there. We have a central governing system that is remote and increasingly perceived by members of the indigenous public as corrupt and refusing to serve them as well as they serve others who are not indigenous. This central government along with its tentacles in local government, administration and the third sector does little to change that perception when it funnels oodles of money and resources into DEI and multiculturalist projects that by their very nature demean and degrade both the indigenous population and those whose have made superlative efforts to side with and live according to the mores of the indigenous.

We also have non-indigenous groups that are becoming highly militant and who are not asking for equality or fair treatment but better treatment than everyone else gets but they are not, as they should be, getting slapped down by a state that should be for everyone but instead their demands are indulged. We can see this in how the state has prioritised the protection of Islam, despite the depredations that too many of the adherents to that ideology have brought to the UK in the form of rape gangs, violent religious extremism and general crime both low to high level. We have areas of the country, including in London, where 48% of the council or housing association properties are headed by the foreign born and which contains schools that have all but abandoned the teaching of Britain’s common history and culture, in favour of pandering to specific groups in the name of multiculturalism.

Britain is an absolute mess, it really is. Many of the conditions that Professor Betz sets out in his piece for a civil war or serious internal conflict to occur are if not here, then just around the chronological corner.

Here’s some excerpts (in italics)from Part One of Professor Betz’s piece on the potential for civil war along with comments (in plain text) from myself:

“….. a generation ago all Western countries could still be described as to a large degree cohesive nations, each with a greater or lesser sense of common identity and heritage. By contrast, all now are incohesive political entities, jigsaw puzzles of competing identity-based tribes, living in large part in virtually segregated ‘communities’ competing over diminishing societal resources increasingly obviously and violently. Moreover, their economies are mired in a structural malaise leading, inevitably in the view of several knowledgeable observers to systemic collapse.

Professor Betz is correct here. Looking back to the late 1990’s Britain, and despite the well known political and economic problems of the time, Britain was still a socially, morally and culturally cohesive state. We, as in the majority population of the UK, had an unspoken confidence that the political problems could be solved at the ballot box, that in extremis the State would protect us from terrorism and crime. We also saw that the economy was functioning, maybe with some problems but it was functioning. Britain made stuff because we hadn’t deindustrialised as much as we have now and parents who saw their children rise from the working class to join what were middle class occupations, such as banking or similar, could be confident that their children would have a better, more comfortable life than they themselves did.

I don’t pick up that sort of vibe now, whether that’s talking to people online or in real life and even when I do pick up comments suggesting satisfaction with the way things are going, they are almost inevitably coming from the beneficiaries of the current system such as the imported ‘strangers’, the middle class left or those who work to further entrench the multiculturalist divisions in our society. For everyone else it’s a case of look around at Britain and despair. It’s a situation where people despair for themselves, despair for the future of their children and despair about what has been done to their communities. We no longer have a cohesive society, just siloised communal groups each doing their own thing with zero reference to the wider society or loyalty to it, apart from what they can get out of it. The identity politics and siloisation disaster that we suffer from is heaped upon government, healthcare, resource allocation and welfare services that are, as Professor Beltz says, close to ‘systemic collapse’. Britain truly is a mess and it is a mess that has been primarily created by the political class and that class’s adherence to really bad ideological paths.

Professor Beltz then goes on to discuss the way that existing social divisions have morphed into massive canyons of division, which have created many of the conditions that have been observed in other nations that have succumbed to civil war. Anybody who takes an interest in what is going on in the West in general and in the United Kingdom in particular, can observe quite keenly that the ethnic, religious, class and other divisions that we now suffer from are getting worse.

Professor Beltz said:

Over the last thirty years the West has preoccupied itself thanklessly in an expeditionary capacity in the invertebrate civil wars of others. It ought to have learned that it is impossible to maintain an integrated multi-valent society once neighbours start kidnapping each other’s children and murdering them with hand drills, blowing up each other’s cultural events, slaying each other’s teachers and religious leaders, and tearing down their icons. It is soberingly worth noting, moreover, that plenty of instances of all those things have occurred already in the West and all of them have occurred in France alone in the last five years.[xxii]

Scenarios, mostly focused on the United States, of what civil wars in the West would look like exist in the literature.[xxiii] They tend to share one thing in common particularly, which is the expectation as expressed by Peter Mansoor, professor of military history at Ohio State University, that they will,

…not be like the first [American] civil war, with armies manoeuvring on the battlefield [but] would very much be a free-for-all, neighbour-on-neighbour, based on beliefs and skin colour and religion. And it would be horrific.[xxiv]

Professor Beltz raises some valid points there. The military establishments of the West have become, or rather should have become, acutely aware of what modern civil wars are and, as Professor Beltz quotes, they are not wars that are fought on battlefields as set piece battles, as the American and English Civil Wars were in the past. Modern civil wars will have a very large element of racial and cultural antagonism to them. Professor Beltz’s comment about the impossibility of maintaining ‘multi valent’ or indeed multicultural societies once the violence starts is bang on correct. I’ve known enough people from Ulster who lived through the Troubles to know that once you get a set up where paramilitary types are killing or maiming civilians from each side then it is difficult if not impossible for normal life to continue. One Protestant friend from years back told me that even to get his dog to the vets, which was in a Catholic area, was fraught with danger. He was in danger from Catholic paramilitaries for being out of his defined area and looked on with suspicion by Protestant extremists for venturing into a Catholic area.

I would argue that we are already at the start of the point where one side, in the case of Britain and other European nations the Islamic side, is killing kids, bombing cultural events and slaying religious leaders. It might not take much for the other side to feel that the violence aimed at them by jihadism is so impossible to ignore that they will cock a snook at what is left of the rule of law and do unto the Muslims, including innocent ones, what they have had done to them. There will not be the equivalent of ‘Gettysburg’ with organised armies facing one another but instead a horrific cavalcade of terror attacks similar to those seen at Bataclan, Manchester Arena, Nice, London 7/7 and many other places, with violent responses to the communities where the jihad is believed to come from, by members of the communities who have been the victims of jihadism. It’s all going to end up in a bloody, horrific mess and what’s worse is this mess could have been avoided. The West could have been more selective with who it allowed to settle into their nations, could have looked at the doctrine of multiculturalism and said very early on that it would not work, could have excluded violent and troublesome religious doctrines and ideologies from religious freedom laws and could have avoided policies that penalise the majority whilst prioritising the rights of minorities. The problem is not only was none of these things done but worse, too many Western nations persecuted those who spoke ill of imported violent religious ideologies or who pointed out the flaws in multiculturalism or who raised the alarm about mass migration from culturally incompatible sources.

Professor Beltz continues in his piece to speak of the problems that multiculturalism and in particular identity politics has created and the role that these ideologies could play in a future breakdown into communal violence in Western nations. It makes for worrying reading.

Professor Beltz added:

Approximately 75 per cent of post-Cold War civil conflicts have been fought by ethnic factions.[xxv] Therefore, that civil war in the West will be likewise is unexceptional. The nature of the belief that Mansoor invokes as being important is, however, worth dwelling upon. I would suggest that the belief in question is the acceptance by all groups in society of the precepts of ‘identity politics’.

Identity politics may be defined as politics in which people having a particular racial, religious, ethnic, social, or cultural identity tend to promote their own specific interests or concerns without regard to the interests or concerns of any larger political group. It is overtly post-national. It is this above all that makes civil conflict in the West not merely likely but practically inevitable, in my view.

I believe that identity politics might have had a legitimate role at some points in the past such as during the campaigns for LGB and racial equality from the 70’s through to the early 90’s but now identity politics is not a solution to problems, it is as Professor Beltz said now a problem in itself. It is a major factor in siloisation of communities and provides the sea in which some of the worst people on the planet, such as jihadis for example, freely swim in.

Unfortunately, identity politics has not been a short term thing that existed only until things like LGB or racial equality were achieved, it stuck around and become a cancer on the Western body politic. It has created a situation where members of particular racial, ethnic, religious and other groups organise not for the benefit of the broader society but mainly to gain advantages and resources for themselves. Identity politics, especially asymmetric identity politics that excludes or sidelines the majority populations of Western nations, may keep on stirring the pot until the pot boils over and the shared home in which we live catches fire.

Reading Professor Beltz’s essay, both the part that I’m quoting from in this piece and the second part which I have linked to below, makes for extremely depressing reading. Many European nations, including the United Kingdom, have the sort of demographic, social, cultural, religious and fiscal statuses that almost invite the sort of internal civil conflict that we, in the modern West, might have thought were part of our now out, or almost out, of living memory, past. We’ve forgotten what the Russian Civil War, the tumults following Germany’s defeat in WWI, the Greek Civil War, the Cypriot Civil War and other similar upheavals were like. If the right spark comes along, say for example a terrorist attack on energy, water, sewage or distribution infrastructure that ends up making our already feral cities even more feral, then we might find out, at great cost, what horrors civil war can bring.

I do not doubt Professor Beltz’s diagnosis of the problems that the West face with potential internal conflict, but I hope that the disease he has identified can be avoided. We might be lucky. It might be the case that the West’s collective political classes pull their heads out of their collective political arses and wake up to the threats to our societies and do something about it. Even if this does happen, turning around severely damaged societies in order to deal with the great many problems that politicians, activists and academics have landed us with is going to be difficult, it might even be bloody but let us hope that it is nowhere as bloody as Professor Beltz’s predicts. As for my part I’ve always called for the people, especially the people of the UK, to use that one great legitimate weapon that previous generations campaigned, fought and sometimes died for, which is the ballot box. As it was in the past, it is also how I feel now – we must try the ballot box before the bullet, since bullets can never ever be called back once they are fired, unlike a politician who can be called back to be accountable to their voters via the electoral system.

I look at the British, European and to a lesser extent the US political scene often and I see voter driven political changes on the horizon, changes that our current political classes are ill-equipped to deal with, partly because it is these classes that have helped to create the current problems in the first place. It seems likely to me, at least from what I can gather from reading around, that the period of 2028 – 2035 might be the time when the public’s patience runs out with the current political crowd and their slavish adherence to the post WWII international settlements and organisations. Then we could find different parties, ostensibly more responsive to voters taking their place. We shall see what happens, although I hope and pray that what is coming is nothing like what Professor Beltz predicts.

Links

Civil War Comes To The West Part One

https://www.militarystrategymagazine.com/article/civil-war-comes-to-the-west/

Civil War Comes To The West Part Two

https://www.militarystrategymagazine.com/article/civil-war-comes-to-the-west-part-ii-strategic-realities/